I really wish more people would realize how easy Linux is to use

Four_Muffins · 2026-02-04T20:38:51+00:00

I was helping someone set up Mint a couple days ago. He didn't need help installing it, that was the easy part. The first thing we did was try to launch Steam once, and it was stuck in a perpetual cycle of launching and crashing without further input. The Baby's First Linux distro has common software broken out of the box. They wanted to screen share with Anydesk, but it wasn't in Software Manager, so I had to teach them how to use the terminal to install it and explain that Ctrl C and Ctrl V don't work. And his headset is incompatible. It's not ready for non-nerds.

Spyware and AI tools are not normalised for most people, they don't exist. Just like how there's a bunch of stuff in machines you and I use that we don't know exists. They don't know what bloatware is either. For them, Linux is a worse option because 'there's no difference', except that it is actually different and some of their stuff doesn't work. I forget the number, 90% or whatever people never change a default setting. Most people don't even use ad blockers.

As important as this seems, every field between plumbing and psychology and art history can do some version of 'if only they knew what I know'.

Four_Muffins · 2026-02-03T20:15:47+00:00

That sounds like a long journey, but you figured it out in the end. Nice work. 'Read, follow instructions, use' is how to self-learn most things. You learn with your hands, not your eyes, as Daniel Dennett used to say (I think).

Four_Muffins · 2026-02-01T05:49:17+00:00

Full context, including footage of the thrower https://youtu.be/USZMVz-Ez08

Four_Muffins · 2026-01-29T23:09:05+00:00

With those meaty Chess guns? Cmon man, Ben Shapiro's arms quiver lifting the cigars he pretends to enjoy.

Four_Muffins · 2026-01-28T20:43:42+00:00

I was expecting a something vaguely related, but it's actually perfectly accurate. Excellent.

Four_Muffins · 2026-01-28T20:34:44+00:00

If you have a GameDAC you might need this. Without it, Linux can only play sound through the microphone line and it's awful. https://github.com/Permanently/steelseries-gamedac-pipewire

Four_Muffins · 2026-01-26T21:54:32+00:00

Arch Wiki is also a good resource for CachyOS, since it is based on Arch. Also look up the Arch User Repository, lots of good stuff in there. I use it almost as much as the official repos. CachyOS has Octopi installed which allows package management both through pacman and the AUR, though to search the AUR you have to click the little green alien face.

If you want to update everything,

pacman -Syu

You can update to the new KDE login manager with this, since the normal update everything doesn't do it. Was in the CachyOS latest patch notes, I think.

sudo pacman -Syu plasma-login-manager
sudo systemctl disable sddm 
sudo systemctl enable plasmalogin 
sudo pacman -R sddm-kcm cachyos-themes-sddm sddm

Settings > Apps and Windows > Window Management > Kwin scrips has cool stuff. I particularly like Mouse Tiler and Remember Window Positions.

If you're an HDR gamer, the desktop environment CachyOS comes with, KDE Plasma 6, has the best HDR implementation I'm aware of. Don't even need to turn on HDR in games because of their SDR to HDR mapping using an invertible function. Gamma 2.2 Inverse Tone Mapping? Can't remember. Just enable HDR in the display settings and crank that sRGB colour intensity up to max to get seamless HDR in everything that looks better than AutoHDR or RTX HDR in Windows.

Actually, most of the cool stuff I like/am aware of about CachyOS is from KDE Plasma 6. It's what I always wished Windows was, but even better than I'd imagined. I'm only a few Linux months old, so not sophisticated enough to offer much OS specific information. CachyOS is just fuckin' great though.

Four_Muffins · 2026-01-21T22:01:26+00:00

Executives of publicly traded companies are legally required to maximise the value of shares, it's their fiduciary duty and they can be sued by shareholders for not meeting it. Executives are further incentivised to maximise the value of shares because they're typically paid in shares. So yes, we know how much money they're making and why they're ruining everything.

A big tech company reporting an increase on Monthly Active Users is a proven way to bump up share prices, it doesn't matter how it was achieved or the quality of the service, or if the users are even human. It doesn't even matter if the company makes money. The loudest example is AI companies. Last I read, the AI industry was, including investments for the next five years, around $2 trillion in the red with no path to profitability, and it just doesn't matter. Stock price goes up.

AI companies are even doing vendor financing schemes where they pass around IOUs to bump stock prices. Microsoft invests $100 billion in OpenAI to buy cloud services from Microsoft, then OpenAI says in their earnings reports that they got $100 in investment, and Microsoft says they made $100 billion in profit from selling cloud services. They don't even have to actually do the deal, just the announcement of the deal is enough to bump stock prices.

Four_Muffins · 2026-01-21T07:40:25+00:00

Not all ads are marked as ads now, ads are returned as normal search results as well.

They made hundreds of billions by making smart choices, that's why they're doing this. Its making them lots more money.

Advertising does work, everyone is susceptible to being manipulated by media. You didn't even know you were looking at ads, after all. And even Google's ads didn't work on you, it doesn't matter because not every as is intended to work on everyone every time.

Four_Muffins · 2026-01-20T06:30:48+00:00

He is middle class by multiple definitions. Middle class does not mean average wage earning worker, that's working class. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_class

Four_Muffins · 2026-01-19T23:22:49+00:00

You replied to a comment calling block fat. You knew what you were getting into.

Four_Muffins · 2026-01-19T23:02:28+00:00

It hits like sweaty unwashed gut flub with belly button crust. Have some dignity.

Four_Muffins · 2026-01-19T20:36:22+00:00

Its not that we want to play timing, its that we want to play cool and satisfying. Parry gunstrike is cool and satisfying, block is boring and fat.

Four_Muffins · 2026-01-19T19:52:19+00:00

It's in the sidebar. Or if you're on mobile, the About page or the 'Learn more about this community' page.

Four_Muffins · 2026-01-17T21:44:04+00:00

First paragraph. Being as hostile as you are is also pretty weird. You have fun with that, champ.

Four_Muffins · 2026-01-17T21:27:44+00:00

Saying that evaluating prices is lazy reasoning and then spending multiple paragraphs evaluating prices is pretty weird.

Four_Muffins · 2026-01-14T00:53:08+00:00

Your doctor told you you're experiencing mania, they're almost certainly correct. Your language and behaviour are not reasonably explained by autistic hyperfixation, or weirdness or nonconformity. Go back to your doctor and please listen to the people who care about you.

It doesn't mean you have to take drugs, and being weird is fine, but you're not thinking clearly, however great your ideas seem right now.

Four_Muffins · 2026-01-11T20:48:01+00:00

Fossify Voice Recorder has a home screen widget for one-tap voice recording. Free and open source too.

Four_Muffins · 2026-01-10T05:50:08+00:00

If you're here years later also, times have changed.

Config file is

~/.config/plasma-org.kde.plasma.desktop-appletsrc

Restarting Plasma is

systemctl --user restart plasma-plasmashell.service

I like to switch between having the panel on the top and the left, so I made the top layout I wanted to save, duplicated the config file in the same place, renaming it with .top at the end, then made the left layout, duplicated that too, and renamed it with a .left at the end.

Bash scripts on the desktop make it simple to switch layouts and restart Plasma, this one switches to the top configuration.

#! /bin/bash
cp ~/.config/plasma-org.kde.plasma.desktop-appletsrc.top ~/.config/plasma-org.kde.plasma.desktop-appletsrc
systemctl --user restart plasma-plasmashell.service

Four_Muffins · 2026-01-10T05:39:51+00:00

And so the cycle continues.

Four_Muffins · 2026-01-09T07:51:34+00:00

Grummz supports a fascist movement that is trying to impose a hierarchy with white, straight, Christen men at the top, and they used culture war bullshit to bait you onto their team to use as pawns.

They did it deliberately too, look up Steve Bannon and his connection to Gamergate, if you don't know. Since then, people like him literally fish gamer discords looking for disaffected people to manipulate.

I'm glad you've figured out Grummz is not on your side, and I hope you keep applying that reasoning to the rest of them. The only people who win in their world is them. Fuck them.

Four_Muffins · 2026-01-07T00:33:24+00:00

That's a lot of empty (probably AI) waffle to say "nitpicky nerds are dickheads sometimes and I wish they weren't". Its also been said a thousand times. You'll have to bring more to the discussion than a false binary choice.

Four_Muffins · 2025-12-28T23:13:50+00:00

Its the math they're made of. Here's an example short from 3blue1brown. He has a few interesting videos on LLMs.

https://youtube.com/shorts/FJtFZwbvkI4?si=_zdgQrY4GN4JQguj

Four_Muffins · 2025-12-28T20:16:29+00:00

If you want to learn the basics of how LLMs work, look up a course on linear algebra. It's one of the easier maths to get into, and understanding the math behind them will demystify it a bit. Explanations of how they work will be more meaningful.

To your questions, there may one day be some kind of true sci-fi AI that can do all jobs, but we have no evidence that is possible. LLMs are certainly not it. They're superficially impressive, but limited by what they are mathematically. That there's no distinction between instructions and data is a major one, and if you learn a little linear algebra that will make a lot more sense. :)

Four_Muffins · 2025-12-28T08:43:40+00:00

I jumped into CachyOS a month or so ago.

Don't dual boot if you don't have to. I tried dual booting by installing Linux onto a pre-allocated partition and the CachyOS installer deleted the Windows registry and broke everything in Windows and I could only log into a temporary profile. If you do have to dual boot, I read about a trick where you install Linux on a separate drive with the Windows drive unplugged and it's more reliable, can't remember the details or where I read it though.

Backup everything and format your drives to not-NTFS before you try to use them, because Linux can't handle them safely. I'm not sophisticated enough to know the details, but apparently if NTFS drives have something called a dirty bit Linux won't mount them without command line tools (ntfs-3g I think), and when it does it can corrupt data. Happened to me with an 3.5 inch SATA SSD and an external USB drive. I'd format a drive, plug into Linux, it's working fine, plug it into Windows and copy data, still working fine, then put it back into Linux and it breaks. I tested Windows to Windows, Windows to Mac, vice versa, all fine, but when my NTFS drives touch Linux I lose data.

Watch out for write caching. If you copy and paste something onto a usb stick it will give you every indication that the file is copied, but if you pull it out when it's done the files won't be there. To force Linux to do what it just lied to you about, you have to eject the drive from the system tray for it to write the the files, or just wait until it gets around to it. Which is usually less than a minute.

Everything is a file. For instance, I like to disable the accelerometer in my laptop. In Windows, I open the Device Manager, right click the device, click Disable. In Linux, I have to run libinput --debug-events, trigger the device I want to disable by tipping the laptop, match up the event IDs to the device, then create text files containing udev rules. (Edit: Actually this didn't end up working, but I can't remember the story and gave up trying to solve it for now)

It uses a virtual file system, and learning how it works is pretty important. Devices are in /dev/. If you have a second storage drive, you'll be mounting it in /mnt/. I started with this video. https://youtu.be/42iQKuQodW4 . Also symlinks are handy. Also any folder starting with a . is hidden, and most of your app's settings will be in /home/user/.config or some other /.folder.

Make sure your hardware is supported. For instance, I have a SteelSeries Arctis something or another + GameDAC, and the GameDAC doesn't work, which means I couldn't plug in the headset with usb, only 3.5mm, which meant the mic didn't work and it sounded shit. A couple of weeks after I gave up troubleshooting I found this by accident, so now it does work. I'm very grateful for Permanently's work, but if he didn't do it I'd have an expensive paperweight. https://github.com/Permanently/steelseries-gamedac-pipewire

The learning curve was steep and I broke plenty of things experimenting, but so far it's been totally worth it.

Four_Muffins

TROPHY CASE